Background

Biography

I joined SELLL in September 2019 as a Lecturer in Language and Cognition and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022. I work on the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of questions in adult and in child language. Though much of my work focuses on Germanic languages (especially English and German), I am interested in multilingual language acquisition of any and all language combinations. I am currently co-Principal Investigator on the AHRC-DFG-funded project QuBiSM (Questions, Bias and Multimodality: Negotiating Meaning in Interaction), with colleagues Dr Johannes Heim (Aberdeen) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Repp (Cologne).

In addition to conducting research and teaching in linguistics, I am ethics convenor for SELLL, advising on ethical protocols for research studies at all levels.

I am also interested in sharing linguistics with wider audiences outside academia. I am one of the 2023 cohort of AHRC-BBC New Generation Thinkers and I have written for The Conversation and Babel, as well as speaking on Voice of Islam DAB radio and The Good Robot podcast.

Past academic positions

2023 Visiting Researcher, Leibniz-Zentrum für Sprachwissenschaft

2015-2019 Senior Lecturer in Language Acquisition, University of Huddersfield

Education

2012-2016 PhD Linguistics, University of York

Fall 2014 Visiting student, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

2011-2012 MA Psycholinguistics, University of York

2006-2010 BA French and Linguistics, University of Sheffield

A life before academia...

Prior to becoming an academic I had a range of jobs including assistant librarian, English language assistant in France, lifeguard and leisure attendant, bar staff, retail, waiting staff, and French-English translator and proofreader.

Research

My research interests

I am currently co-Principal Investigator on the AHRC-DFG-funded project QuBiSM (Questions, Bias and Multimodality: Negotiating Meaning in Interaction), with colleagues Dr Johannes Heim (Aberdeen) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Repp (Cologne). I am principally responsible for work packages on child acquisition of negative biased questions, their morphosyntax, semantics and prosody.

I am primarily interested in questions, both main and embedded. I am trying to understand their syntax, semantics, discourse properties, and how they are acquired by children. This plays into a broader interest in the acquisition of speech acts by children - how do they use their knowledge of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, prosody and gesture to map structures to meanings?

Relatedly, I also work on clausal embedding, particularly embedded Verb Second and discourse particles.

Another strand of interest concerns codeswitching in multilingual communities.

Past projects have included bilingual first language acquisition, dative constructions, clitic doubling, sentential adverbs and possessives.

Current PhD students

Abdulrahman Alawadhi (2023-present): Gapping in Kuwaiti Arabic

Deanna Dawson (2024-present): Language Learning Motivation among Young Adults in the North-East of England: A Mixed-Methods Exploration

Please note that I do not work on language education (e.g. children's literacy etc.) so if you are interested in pursuing further study in an area of language education, please contact other colleagues.

Teaching

Since 2024:

Semester 1

SEL2235/8696 Current Hypotheses in Language Development (CHiLD)/Topics in Language Development Research (ToDLR)

Semester 2

SEL3438/8695 The Black Box of Child Language Acquisition/Learning and Learnability

Since 2019:

Semester 1

SEL1008 Nature of Language

Semester 2

SEL2230/8683 Multilingualism

Past teaching:

2020-2022 SEL1028 Introduction to the Structure of Language II: Meaning strand

Publications

• Articles

  • Cuskley C, Woods R, Flaherty M. The Limitations of Large Language Models for Understanding Human Language and Cognition. Open Mind 2024, 8, 1058-1083.
  • Woods R. Everyone's been wondering what are the mechanisms for interpreting embedded root clauses in German and English. Journal of Pragmatics 2024, 232, 4-25.
  • Heim J, Cuskley C, Woods R, Barber J, Donnelly H, Hu R, Sharma A, Pichler H. A flexible model for exposing and mitigating the hidden curriculum in the transition to higher education. Open Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 2024, 3(2), 30-55.
  • Woods R, Haegeman L. Removing question force from interrogative clauses: the West Flemish particle kwestje. Quaderni di lavoro ASIt 2023, (25), 821-860.
  • Woods R, Vicente L. Metacommunicative-why fragments as probes into the grammar of the speech act layer. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2021, 6(1), 1-32.
  • Woods R. Towards a model of the syntax-discourse interface: a syntactic analysis of please. English Language and Linguistics 2020, n/a, n/a.
  • Tsoulas G, Woods R. Predicative Possessives, Relational Nouns, and Floating Quantifiers. Linguistic Inquiry 2019, 50(4), 825-846.
  • Woods R. The acquisition of dative alternation by German-English bilingual and English monolingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2015, 5(2), 252-284.

• Book Chapters

  • Woods R, Roeper T. Rethinking auxiliary doubling in adult and child language: How verb-movement turns propositions into illocutionary acts. In: Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe, ed. Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp.835-861.
  • Wolfe S, Woods R. Introduction. In: Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe, ed. Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp.1-11.
  • Woods R. A different perspective on embedded Verb Second: Unifying embedded root phenomena. In: Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe, ed. Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp.297-322.
  • Woods R. Embedded inverted interrogatives: investigating the acquisition of non-canonical embedded questions. In: Bart Hollebrandse, Jaieun Kim, Ana T. Perez-Leroux and Petra Schulz, ed. UMOP 41: T.O.M. and Grammar: Thoughts on Mind and Grammar: A Festschrift in Honor of Tom Roeper. Amherst, MA: GLSA, 2018, pp.179-194.

• Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

  • Woods R, Heim J, Wallenberg J. Input beyond the Threshold: Explaining Auxiliary Initial Assertions in a British English Early Talker. In: Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. 2024, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ [online]: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA.
  • Woods R, Roeper T. The Acquisition Path of 'High' Negation in English. In: 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 45). 2021, Boston University, Boston MA [Online]: Cascadilla Proceedings Press.
  • Woods R. Modelling the syntax-discourse interface: a syntactic analysis of 'please'. In: 23rd Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe. 2016, University Paris Diderot, Paris, France: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
  • Woods R. Embedded Inverted Questions as Embedded Illocutionary Acts. In: 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. 2016, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA.

• Edited Book

  • Woods R, Wolfe S, ed. Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

• Online Publication

  • Woods R. 'Like' isn't a lazy linguistic filler - the English language snobs need to, like, pipe down. The Conversation, 2019. Available at: https://theconversation.com/like-isnt-a-lazy-linguistic-filler-the-english-language-snobs-need-to-like-pipe-down-122056.